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Geek Culture / can't format drive that had linux on it

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Phaelax
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2009 21:08
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I had Open Suse on a PC and needed to wipe it clean for another project. My friend who set it up had partitioned the drive in half, so I tried to use FDisk to delete the partitions and create 1 whole one. It says I can't delete the partition when logical partitions exists. I can't delete the logical partition because it says none exist. So I'm kinda stuck.

I put the drive into another PC and was going to clear all this up in XP, but XP wouldn't even see the harddrive. Any suggestions how I can reclaim my drive to format it back to FAT32 with a single partition?

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Mr Z
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2009 21:18
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Have you tried with GParted? Has always been reliable to me, may work... maybe. It´s free anyway, so you cannot loose anything by trying.

There is no greater virtue, then the ability to face oneself.
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David R
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2009 21:20 Edited at: 2nd Feb 2009 21:22
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GParted live CD should do the trick

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828

EDIT: The SF download tree magically splits in two for some reason, here's a more current list of ISOs (2008):

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=271779


09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
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bitJericho
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2009 21:20
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sounds like something went wrong. Are you sure XP doesn't see the hard driver. Go to control panel > administrative tools > computer management

And try formatting the drive from there. (I assume that's what you were talking about). If that fails, you could try a linux live cd and see if it can read the disk.

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Benjamin
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2009 21:20
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If you can delete all but one partition, just format that partition as FAT32 and resize it, if possible.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2009 21:43
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It won't let me format that part because its a non-DOS partition it says.

I'll give gparted a try tonight. I believe the drive is also a WD, so I may be able to use their quick-format tool. Believe it or not, I still use floppies from time to time.

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bitJericho
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2009 21:45
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You'll have to delete the partition first. Then you create a new partition, preferably using the NTFS format. Here's a guide with some pics:

http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-194-formatting-your-hard-drive

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Phaelax
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2009 21:55
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Still brings me back to the original problem, I cannot delete the partition. And Windows cannot see the harddrive. I have to use FAT32 because I'll be putting Win98se on it (needed for some legacy apps that won't work in xp even under compatibility mode).

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JoelJ
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2009 22:33
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I know this doesn't solve the partition problem...
but have you tried making a windows98 virtual machine? I would think that would be more convenient than booting into it. and it's Win98, I don't imagine you'd take much of a performance hit by using a VM. I barely notice I'm in a VM when I use XP with VirtualBox.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2009 01:16
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Can't do that either as I believe part of the issue is also the hardware. Some old games don't seem to like newer Nvidia cards

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ionstream
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2009 01:22
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Well I can only assume that you don't want the data on the drive, so the following should clear it out so that you can do what you want to it:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

Where /dev/hda is the location of the drive. It'll take a while, but once you do that then fdisk should see it as a completely blank drive and allow you to do what you want to it.

Hoping that works!

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JoelJ
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2009 06:57
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Quote: "Some old games don't seem to like newer Nvidia cards"

VirtualBox doesn't use the nvidia or ati drivers. It uses it's own, so it could work.
It would be worth a shot, I think.

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